Is your relationship with your CRM on the rocks? Or is it worse than that and you’ve sworn off CRMs and are trying to manage your book of business with a solution of spreadsheets and sticky tape?  

Know that you’re not alone.  

For years now, revenue teams have had a love/hate relationship with CRMs (weighing a little more heavily on the hate) because CRMs have been making big promises they couldn’t keep, being all take and no give, and never talking about anything meaningful.  

And anyone who has ever been in a relationship like that knows exactly how draining it is.  

You see it all too often. The team is working hard. Pipeline looks active. But revenue is getting missed. It’s frustrating for leaders, and knocks the confidence of account managers.  

And it's even worse for complex, relationship-driven businesses where there are either lots of customers, or lots of products, or both. 

But it’s not a people problem. It’s a systems problem.  

Because most CRMs don’t connect to ERP data, they: 

• Can only show you what you told them 

• Take a lot without giving much in return 

• Don’t help your team hit quota 

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.  

You can do better 

Most CRMs were built to track activity, not guide decisions. They show what has already happened (after significant, reluctant, and sometimes inaccurate data entry from sellers), but don’t help teams see where revenue is at risk, spot opportunities, or know what to do next.  

And often it’s pretty obvious they’re being designed by the tech industry, for the tech industry. They’re helpful for a new-logo acquisition play, but not up to much when it comes to managing a complex book of business.  

No wonder people are falling out of love with them.  

The issue here is that the nature of business is changing. The sellers who have been around forever and know every customer and product are reaching retirement age, and businesses need to scale their focus from small numbers of lucrative accounts to a larger section of the customer pool.  

It’s time for a new type of CRM. One that complex, relationship-driven businesses can depend on to be a stable, helpful partner. A system of guidance that can come to the table with suggestions about where opportunities and issues are hiding in ERP data.  

So that you can fall in love with your CRM again. And more importantly, drive revenue.